InvestorBlogger

Dynamism is a cool website that sells and ships similar devices to dozens of countries. This video provides an overview of the Asus Eee PC, if you haven’t already seen it.

Asus Eee PC from Dynamism on Vimeo.

Hope you find it informative. I enjoyed it very much. The model illustrated is the new 8GB model with 1GB ram, in a stylish pink. I’d still love one, but I’m wondering if I should wait for the 8.9″ model.

Cindy, one of my colleagues at my school, has been helping us make some banners for announcements for our upcoming events and Chinese New Year Holiday. She highly recommended the software called 非常好色6是DIY美工創作的必備幫手 which translates roughly as “Very Colorful 6 is a DIY art and creative tool that is a necessary help”. The tool can be used to create pages like the ones in the image below.

In fact, she used the software to create the following Chinese New Year notice, that we are placing on our school website and handing out to students.

In fact, she designed the funky notice. Then she exported the document using a PDF print driver called PDFCreator 0.95 (I think). The real problem came when we tried to order the software through the Interweb. I was quite surprised that the publisher called NewSoft which had an international website could run such a weird system. Rather than retype everything, here’s the email I fired off to the publisher.

Dear NewSoft…

I recently had a frustrating experience trying to buy Chinese language software from your company… Your Website for Taiwan is terrible…

1. it doesn’t work with Firefox? And that’s really not very professional…

2. when I opened it in IE7, I successfully managed to order, but the software CLOSED my browser, tried to popup a new window without my permission, and caused me to wonder why I bothered trying to order
anything from your site.

3. then when I accessed your website again, I was told that my browser (IE7) was out of date, and to download new crap onto my system… If you want customers to come into your store, do you really ask them to change their shoes and coat first… ?

I’m sorry but your e-commerce site is really awful, and I’ve done a lot of shopping online in the past: It’s not friendly to non-IE7 browsers (let’s not mention Linux!), isn’t friendly to people who can’t read Chinese fluently yet (and the buy button is so ridiculously small), and then crashed my browser, and left me wondering whether or not I had successfully completed the order.

Overall, it created unnecessary demands on e-commerce users… I wonder how many customers would bother to even try the second time, or the third time…. Like I did. Or how many would even bother to write this email… Perhaps I’ll just post it on my blog tonight…

Best Wishes
Kenneth

Unfortunately, in Taiwan there is a huge assumption for local websites that IE6 or IE7 is the ONLY browser in use. It’s like most companies are unaware of the need to develop websites that have core functionality that is accessible for non-IE6/7 browsers or systems. A kind gentleman called Frank that responded promptly to my email admitted as much. But he didn’t care to explain the sense of that.

Is your site browser friendly or browser neutral? Have you checked? With mobile blogging and e-commerce likely to become a big phenomenon, designing websites that are cross browser compatible is a necessity if you wish to be taken seriously in the e-commerce world. And Apple which uses Safari and Firefox as browsers is also growing its PC market share above 5% of late. Linux installs are also growing. Opera is also multi-platform as a browser, and is very standards-compliant. At the very least, functionality should degrade in a way that is not obvious to visitors.

But in the website I used, even the dropdown menus didn’t work in IE7 as well as Firefox. It just seems that if a company is serious about online business, the website needs to respect as many choices as possible, it needs to be properly tested, and it needs to be maintained. You can’t just build your website and forget about it.

There were other usability issues including the a javascript error, and popups to documents that can be printed out, but which may crash your browser.

So, do test your e-commerce website as much as you can before, during and after the launch. Keep it uptodate and make it as user friendly as possible. Otherwise customers will experience errors and simply close the browser, click away or enter a URL of one of your competitors, instead. All of these result in lost sales.

Frustrations of Dreamhost

Dreamhost is billing me for bills that don’t exist! I’ve been using their hosting for nearly four years now, but this problem (and no host is without ‘issues’) is vexing. I emailed them questioning them on this.

This is just a notice that your DreamHost Account #####
(“*** Account”) has a balance of $40.80 (including any charges not
due until 2009-01-30), with $40.80 due (since 2008-12-30).

You also have $40.80 past due (owed since 2008-11-30), and if
by 2009-01-30 you do not pay at least the $40.80 part, your
account will be automatically suspended until payment is received.

If you would like to CLOSE your account with DreamHost, just visit:

Since I always pay on time, I knew this to be an error. In fact, I checked yesterday’s billing for something else… So I replied as I was nervous about losing my account!

Dear Dreamhost…

I’m sorry but I don’t understand what is going on with my billing… I
paid my bills on time, and the panel (when it works) shows no
outstanding amount… so could you advise urgently what is going on.

Kenneth

Then I tried to login to my billing in the Dreamhost Panel. Not loading. So then I sent an email to support but it was rejected because it didn’t have an account number or any details. The rejected email told me to login to my panel and request support. Hah!

We’re sorry.. your email was unable to be processed by our automatic
support system, and so is being returned to you.

Our system could not find the open support case you were replying to,
and so could not automatically tie your message into our system. If this
was a reply to an EXISTING issue, please be sure to keep the:

[blah 123456]

in the subject line of your reply!

If this is regarding a NEW issue, we must ask that you submit it
through our web panel at:

So then I sent another email as an attachment to my original billing problem with the following words because Panel is still not working…

Also, and this is a major problem, your Panel is NOT WORKING… And I
can’t send email advising you of this… because the email that I
originally sent. There is no phone number or contact number so how on
earth are we supposed to contact you when there is a panel outage, we
don’t already have a ticket in the system, and your system rejects
emails addressed to support@dreamhost.com

I’d say this is a pretty serious issue.

Kenneth

As if this were not rebuke enough, it was similarly sent back with the following error…

This is the Postfix program at host kitty.sd.dreamhost.com.

I’m sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be
be delivered to one or more recipients. It’s attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to <postmaster>

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the attached returned message.

So then I checked the Dreamhost Status Website, no support is provided, just notifications.

So then checked the contact page, and the contact form wouldn’t load, and there was no telephone number, only a fax number and address.

I’m so very unimpressed that I had to blog this. I will be filing a formal complaint with them once the panel issue is resolved, and I’m removing the link to their ‘rewards’ program as a punishment for them.

I’ll be interested in a response from them on this issue. What do you think about Dreamhost?

The backlash against Google’s Tyranny is growing, and even after two months, there is still a lot of anger and frustration at Google’s actions over “no_follow” and the recent downgrades of blogs. In fact, the recent actions, actions that Google has taken against many websites for problems that are more to do with their own inabilities as a Search Engine to manage their results, have led many bloggers to see Google’s oft quoted mantra “Do No Evil” in a whole new light.

As many of you know, the crew at Google felt it appropriate to snip away at InvestorBlogger’s PR rank until it went from 4 to 0, all the while ignoring blatant violations of the same TOS by well-known websites who were quietly called by Google and advised of the situation. Such hubris is evidenced by Google’s eagerness to snatch vast tracts of the world of media from Internet, Video, Books, Radio, Newspapers and much much more.

There is an increasing backlash among bloggers regarding Google’s behavior towards webmasters , as it is no longer telling bloggers how to blog, but also what to blog…

With Google’s increasing ownership and development of new websites (Gmail, Google Docs, Picasa, etc.), it is getting more and more difficult to extricate yourself from their grasp. But I’m here to tell you: it can be done. And it’s not that difficult.

Step One: Take Stock of the Services You Use.

Find out what services you readily and regularly use. For this, you may need to observe and record a daily log of what you regularly use. Or you can find out which Google sites are saved in your favorites. Once I took stock of my usage, I was surprised at the number, range, and depth of the services I use:

• Gmail – I use this on a daily basis and have several different accounts with them. Fortunately, mail can easily be accessed and downloaded via POP mail or via IMAP. With large amounts of data, though, you may need to use an account with a larger mailbox than many services have.
• Google News – Again this is something that I use often, and along with Google Image Search and Google Search, I find that I use these almost several times a day. There are alternatives to each of the services.
• Google Docs – This nascent service is gradually gaining in complexity and at this time there are few equivalent offerings available. So simply cut the usage as much as you can, so you are not particularly dependent on the service.
• Picasa and the web albums – Picasa, like most of the products in Google Docs, is the result of an acquisition by Google. The software is generally quite easy to use, well-integrated with their Web Albums, but can be used independently.
• Reader – for RSS feeds, this service offers you the ability to log and subscribe to feeds for blogs, and other websites with RSS feeds. It is generally quite powerful, but it is far from unique.
• YouTube – recently took the crown from Google Video as their primary video offering. There are a number of issues that using YouTube has that I’ve found make it difficult to use YouTube for hosting my own video: lack of control for placement of videos on other websites (you can block websites, but you can’t choose); uploading issues that frequently happen; and video unavailability (perhaps due to apparent TOS problems) in which videos are removed without notice.

For those of you who seek to create websites and blogs and monetize, the trio of sites including Adsense, Analytics and Webmaster Tools are websites that you may choose to eliminate.

• Adsense: I’ve already blogged quite a lot about the problems of Adsense (including dropping clickthrus, click fraud, banned accounts, etc.), but the biggest issue seem to center on the primary issues: to get revenue from visitors, they have to CLICK AWAY from your site; Adsense Ads generally are really ugly; you’re displaying ads for websites for FREE if users don’t click; and, worst of all, the amount of clicks that get discounted for a variety of reasons is turning into an avalaunche (I can’t tell you how many it is because I’m still using Adsense, but it’s far more than you’d think).
• Analytics: I have enjoyed Analytics for a couple of years, because of the depth of information that is available, and the conservative nature of the counting system that is used. I tend to favor using a conservative method consistently so that I can measure ‘real’ growth, rather than some of the less accurate metrics available using Alexa, SiteStats, etc.
• Webmaster Tools: I’m still puzzling exactly what this set of tools is for, as it seems a way for Google to make their Search Engine at least appear transparent. Unfortunately, the stats and tools are quite limited. About the only thing I valued it for was the sitemap function. Other than that, I just don’t get it. It returns a lot of false positives, incorrect links, and other problems that are non-existent.

Step Two: Prioritize the Services You Need/Dump Those You Don’t.

Once you have compiled your list, you’ll be able to see what you can do by prioritizing what services you can leave immediately, what you can slowly wind down, and what services you are still relying on. Separating the services into these three categories is a good way to triage your use of Google.

For example, I found out that YouTube videos for my business can be just as effectively hosted on my own website as on YouTube. I don’t particularly want tons of people to see these videos as they were intended for a very targeted audience only. Hence, I’m now downloading the videos, saving them, converting them to FLVs and then replacing them in my website. Since I only have a dozen or so, this task can be accomplished quickly.

Other services like Google News can be replaced immediately without any problem for me. But some services will just have to wait, while I figure out how to extricate myself from dependence on them. Gmail is a good example of that. While I don’t particularly like the new versions of Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail, and the spam filters on my own websites email system aren’t particularly good, it looks like Gmail is here to stay for a while!

So this list of resources resulted in my own decisions

1. Immediately: Google News, Search and Image Search; Webmaster Tools;
2. Gradually: Adsense; Analytics; Picasa and WebAlbums, YouTube; and
3. With Difficulty: Gmail and Docs.

Step Three: Finding Quality Equivalents to Google Services .

Once you have created your action list and prioritized what is needed or not, it’s time to get your hands dirty. But remember, like all drug addicts, you will need to withdraw slowly from your dependence on Google. Few of us could go cold Turkey. If you can, then you’re lucky.

Many of the services have exact or inexact equivalents that can suffice: Gmail can be replaced by Yahoo! Mail; Picasa by Flickr; Google Search by Ask.com or Yahoo! Search; Adsense by Yahoo! Publishers, or any of a variety of alternatives; YouTube by Revver or MySpace Video ; etc..

Once success story is that I’ve already switched away from Google Reader to BlogLines by exporting my OPML file in Reader, then reimporting the result to BlogLines. It worked quickly and effetively, though the different environment takes some getting used to. This for me was a timely switch because in fact there was an uproar about Google sharing your public or shared stories with others in Google Talk.

I’m already about to remove my videos, pictures, Adsense in the next few weeks or months. But it’s going to take time to extricate myself from the Google Web. I know I can do it. But in some places, I may just choose to find another way to get back at Google instead: I have installed an AdBlocker, and while I don’t particularly use it at the moment, I can see for those services where ads are shown (such as Gmail), I could happily turn it on, simply to deny Google the opportunity to make any money from me. After all, since they’ve taken hundreds of dollars out of my pocket and others like me, I can do the same thing, too.

Final Thoughts

At the moment, I can’t think of any other tools that I really use Google for. But since this is an exercise in freeing oneself slowly from Google’s grip, it’s wise to look through the list and find the services that you really need the least or that have strong equivalents.

It’s also wise to be more cautious in the future, lest by our collective actions we create another Frankenstein monster, cobbled together by the stitching of the web, and left to run amok until we collectively realize and treat the madness that allowed it to be created in the first place.

Do you know of any good equivalents to Google Services I have NOT mentioned so far? Please comment them. Let me know what you think about the situation!

Disclaimer: There are no links in this post to any Google Services. But this blog still utilizes several services, including Adsense, Webmaster Tools, Analytics… I’m working to get rid of them in stage 2.

It’s a touch screen Eee PC! Nice. And he modded it himself!

After all my server problems of last week, I relied very much on a blogger’s Old But Forgotten Friend, FTP. I was reminded of this when Steve Sutherland of AgentsChat.com dropped by yesterday.

Steve’s been one of my customers for a while and I occasionally help him on his work with his forums. In fact, it was work on his logos that gave rise to several of my posts: AgentsChat – a whole new look and Creating a Clickable Image Map (both of these posts are of general interest).

Anyway, he was experimenting with hiding affiliate links and wanted to use the .htaccess file codes to create 301 Redirects … but I realized that he didn’t know too much about FTP (and I didn’t know much either). I’ll be looking at these Redirects soon.

So what is FTP?

Well, after reading the Wikipedia article on File Transfer Protocol, you’ll know a lot more than I do, that’s for sure! Simply, though, FTP is a way to send files (ie. data, whether it is pictures, files, text, programs…) from one computer to another. Usually, bloggers will have their own host that is hosted at http://www.yourblogname.com, and for the most part, you will not need to access your files via FTP. In fact, some blogging tools make it really easy to upload, and you may not even realize that you are using FTP.

But there are times when you may need to upload or download files via FTP, such as when you are uploading or downloading dozens of files (images or movies), larger files, or special files; then FTP is the most reliable way to achieve this, and in some cases, the ONLY way to do this. So how do you access your FTP site? Well, for most domains, the website is accessed via the FTP:// command (NOT HTTP://) and your website is found at a slightly modified address: ftp://ftp.yourblogname.com (Yes, you’ll likely need to enter ftp twice).

Easy Downloading

For most browsers these days (IE6+7, FF2.0, Opera, etc), you can enter your FTP site by entering the address in the address bar. You will be then prompted for your FTP user name and your password. (These are NOT your blog user name or passwords but will have been issued to you separately).

You will then find a list of the files at your blog which you can ONLY download. It should look something like this. IE works very similarly to Firefox, too.

You are now placed in the ‘root’ or base directory of your account. Here you can see four different folders. But if you are maintaining a website, then you will need to find the directory that has a domain name, investorblogger.com. That is the home of this website. Of the four files here, it is the only one that is visible, but the other files are private files that can’t be accessed via the Internet, except by FTP.

You don’t really need much if you want to download stuff, but uploading is another matter, it’s a little more complicated than downloading, but you need the same basic information, and a new tool, an FTP program.

3 FTP Tools: Uploading large or multiple files

Most reasonable OSes these days include some form of FTP. Windows has two FTP programs, the first of which you already saw. But the second is included in Windows Explorer (not Internet Explorer). Simply open a regular Windows explorer and enter the user name and password, and you will enter the FTP site as above.

Then you will be taken to the root. And it should look like the following image:

This time though the view is different and you can now upload, move, rename and delete files. The FTP actions will be a little slower than Windows Explorer proper, but you will find it easy to use. Take a look at the image to see what I mean. A word of caution: FTP does not have a recycle bin. So if you delete a file, it is gone PERMANENTLY. You won’t be able to retrieve the file via FTP. So tread carefully.

There are other tools for FTP, but Windows Explorer usually works without too much trouble. You can also find two other great tools: FileZilla and FireFTP (for FF). Remember to download the Client version, not the Server edition.

Using FileZilla

Set up is a little more complicated for these tools, but they have additional functionality, stability and speed. I’ll show you how to set up one tool, and the basic information should be the same for most FTP tools. Naturally, there are variations but they are beyond the scope of this ‘Introduction.’

This is the setup screen from FileZilla, which is available when you start the program, under File >>> Site Manager. Click ‘New Site’. You will need to enter the basic details as above: but first set the Logontype to Normal. Then enter the host details (that’s FTP.yourblogname.com). Leave the port number (the entry key to your PC) as ’21′. Enter the User and Password. Then hit Connect to connect to the server.

After a few seconds, the screen will activate and a bunch of information will fly by. It will look something like this: reduced in size to hide personal information. Sorry!

• 1. The top box is the messages between your computer and the server.
• 2. This box is the file structure of your computer;
• 3. The box is the current folder.
• 4. This box is the file structure on the server.
• 5. And the final box below is the list of files you want to upload (if any).

Double clicking on any file in either #3 or #4 will copy the file to the other PC. So if you double click on a file in #3, it will copy itself in a few seconds to the server. Obviously you may need to choose the folder where you want to put it and open that folder first. Double clicking on a file in #4 will copy the file to YOUR computer. Try it. When activating either, the files will be listed in box #5 and the instructions and messages will be listed in #1. Confused? I was the first time. Experiment a few times before you do anything that you might regret!

WebFTP: in your browser

If you are really lucky, and your hosting company is smart (like Dreamhost is!), you will be able to upload files with a neat piece of software called Net2FTP that allows you to perform pretty much every FTP action IN YOUR WEB BROWSER. Dreamhost Web Hosting provides this at http://webftp.dreamhost.com (Yes, that’s http:// … not ftp://…). This kind of tool is very handy if you’re uploading only a few files or you’re not working at home, or wherever it’s not convenient or allowed to install an FTP program.

Which then takes you to the root folder as above:

All of the actions that you can perform are listed in the drop down box on the right. Folders are listed below as folders (well that’s a surprise!) and click on the folder opens and lists the contents of the folder. Don’t be scared to play with dummy files and folders, but don’t delete important things. There is no recycle bin!

Caution: FTP does not have a ‘Recycle Bin’ nor does it have an ‘undo’ function, changes are immediate and permanent!

There are quite a few more intricacies that you will discover as you use FTP and encounter problems. FTP is the fastest and most reliable way to upload and download files from servers. As such, it’s a great tool to learn whichever of the three ways listed here you decide to use the most.

Oh, you can find FTP tools for your CRUZER, too. And remember FTP can also mean a “Friend To Publishers”!

Well, I’ve finished fixing the server yesterday morning… so if any visitors had come by in the last two days, they’d have been met by a spinning wheel, as the server overloaded itself.

At first, I thought that I had been dugg like John Cow was recently, but I must admit… after looking at the logs, it was a problem with one of the WordPress installs… One of the blogs hosted on this server had six or seven plugins that hadn’t been used much and were conflicting with each other, WordPress and the server itself. Most of the time, things were fine. But somehow on Saturday, a set of circumstances conspired to turn this plugin into a nightmare scenario that prevented ALL the sites hosted on my server (including HTML sites) from loading. Anyway, …

… This is what I learned from the whole affair. Here are seven steps that can help you find and manage problems.

1. Keep your WordPress updated. Don’t let old and out of date versions stay on your server or hosting. Often WordPress is patched for SECURITY reasons. Using the most recent versions helps avoid your website being ‘hacked’. There are currently two tracks of WordPress. Whichever one you use, you need to find the most recent version on the website. Legacy Version and Latest Version.

2. Manage your plugins: when you upload a plugin, activate it or remove it. If you don’t use it, why waste the server resources on unused plugins. You can simply move it to your root directory where it can hide away out of trouble. Some plugins will cause problems even when they are just installed.

3. Keep your plugins updated as well. And if you update WordPress, update your plugins if possible at the same time. With WordPress 2.3.1 + there is a notification system of new updates for most plugins. If your plugin refuses to work, you had better remove it.

4. When you upload plugins, upload your plugins to the right place. Sometimes the zip files that most plugins use has an extra level of directories, so when you unzip the files and upload the entire folder the plugin is still invisible because it is TOO deep. Other plugins have special instructions that tell you to upload your plugin files to more than one directory.

5. Don’t upload plugins in several places or plugins that perform the same tasks, even if they are unactivated. They may cause problems with the installed plugins or with WordPress. For example, in the site there were three plugins handling sitemaps for Google and Yahoo! So, choose one and remove the others.

6. Keep an eye on your server logs, esp. the error logs that your server generates every night. I noted that some days the files were quite big. Open and read them. You may not understand what the errors mean, but you can google the basic codes easily to give you some idea of what’s going on.

Also, if you are seeing a lot of errors, then you know that somewhere on your server, something is going wrong. The server logs are located usually in the root directory under ‘logs’ and the error logs are stored in an appropriate directory for your domain under that!

7. If you are having problems with server stability, turn off all the plugins. Then slowly turn on each one in an incremental fashion over a long enough period. If the problem returns when you turned on one plugin, you may have the offender! Of course, you should also check the website of the plugin author to find out if there have been any recent problems.

For example, the plugin that was installed had a note that was new which said: “After almost 1000 downloads of this plugin and our own use on multiple hosts we have not heard of any serious issues untill the other day we were contacted about the plugin cuasing a huge overage in traffic for a site it had been installed on. …”

8. Limit the number of plugins and themes you have installed at one time. Each plugin and theme requires space on the server, as well as server CPU and memory. I don’t have a limit on the number of plugins you can have, but it is wise to keep the number down. Some plugins are largely redundant for those bloggers who have more than rudimentary knowledge of HTML and WordPress. For example, plugins for websites information, like Rankings and Signatures can often be mimicked by simple code placed in the theme or in the sidebar.

9. Keep your load time down, too. Often bloggers keep adding Javascripts, sidebars, PHP calls, etc., to the blog sidebars, but each of them slows down the load time for the readers. If you are not sure, you can test your blog with a stopwatch or a load time tool. Try to keep load times under 30 seconds on broadband. Otherwise users may just be tempted to close the window or enter another URL. After John Chow’s redesign, his load time shot up to over 45 seconds.

10. And don’t forget to contact your webhosting support , for more advice. They won’t be able to help much with a number of things because they can’t advise on every possible plugin-theme-application compatibility issue, but they will advise on basic things, and point you in the right direction!

So sadly that was how I spent my Saturday night and most of Sunday morning… fixing a server. Now it’s purring like a cat again, I learned my lesson on what NOT to do, and you guys get a post… ! So I guess it all comes out in the wash!

Let’s hear YOUR server horror stories… What happened? How did you deal with it? What other tips did you learn?

It’s NOT Computex, there’s no John Chow… and there are no freebies for you guys! (This time!…)

Today was the last day for the 2007 IT Month Show in Taipei, and I went along to see what was going on, to do a little ‘bargain’ shopping and get some snaps of some cool devices… Unfortunately, most of Taipei City and Taipei County (combined population approx 6,000,000 inhabitants) also decided to go, too.

As you can see from outside, and inside!

It was difficult to get any pictures of the stall presentations because there were too many basketball playing supertall visitors! Mmm… Still, this is the Transcend stall, and free pens were being given away! I didn’t catch any: it was too difficult with a camera in one hand, and a cup of coffee in the other!

Aha! The HTC stall, with lots of pricy but ultra cool models… They really do give Apple a run for their money, and they’re available NOW! So… why wait!?

The HTC stall had some really *cool* phones, including the TYTN II, the Touch, and I got to try one!

Can you spot this model? Of course, this one is MY hand… But the glare obliterates the lovely screen.

Slipping over to Lenovo, I thought I’d entered a car exhibition, as their F1 car was on show…! No mere pc simulations here…!

Vroom!… And onto the other Hall 3… where the Asus Eee PC had their very OWN stall separate from the ASUS stall! And it was crowded… but not as crowded as the primary stall… Wow! Still, there’s a large amount of interest in the ASUS Eee PC, and I found out that the black models are now available, as are 8GB models, and pricing is good…

I think this model is the 8GB model, but I didn’t get a chance to try it! I tried the 4GB and noted that the keyboard quality on the model seemed much better than the first models I tried a month or so ago! Of course, the Eee PC 8GB was on sale but there were no more in stock. ASUS were taking back orders only for that!

It has 1GB of RAM and 8GB of internal flash memory and runs on the same 900MHz Intel Celeron chip. Battery power is rated at 3.5 hours, as well. So it’s quite a respectable device. Matched with a portable 2.5″ hard disk with 120GB of space, this would make an acceptable device ‘for the road.’

This picture was taken from the Sony Cybershot T2 trucks, I managed to get the pink truck, but there were three or four different colors of trucks all selling the range of Cybershot cameras… Cute trucks, nice cameras!

And so I thought I’d end today’s trip to the World Trade Center’s IT Month 2007 with a picture taken in neighboring 101 shopping mall. The Mercedes C Class… with a rather unique paint job. (Anyone know why shopping malls and exhibitions like to display CARS…?)

OK, I was just checking my logs again today after seeing a couple of odd spikes in activity in the last few hours. I have now decided to bite the bullet, and turn off the plugins en masse, except for three base plugins: PXS Mail Form, wp-cache, and my TLA plugin.

Other than that, they’re all going off. Since this is a blogger’s blog, and some of you have interest in WordPress, hosting and whatnot… I’ve decided to share EVERYTHING about this problem…

To those of you who are wondering what is wrong… please read yesterday’s post. In summary, one or two of my plugins are causing the server unnecessary work, and I still haven’t found what one it is.

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Here’s the list of plugins that I currently have, but since this has been an on-going problem since September, I’m beginning to wonder whether an upgrade in PHP by my host actually started the problems then.

I’ve installed and am currently using these plugins:

• All in One SEO Pack 1.3.8.4 – Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.
• Dashboard Editor 0.2 – Allows you to customise the dashboard. By Aaron Harun.
• **Feedburner Feed Replacement 2.2 – Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while letting through some important User-Agents.
• **Feed Footer 1.1 – Add custom footers (copyright, notices, advertisements) to the bottom of your posts in your RSS feed.
• Flash Video Player 2.0 – Simplifies the process of adding video to a WordPress blog.
• Lighter Admin Drop Menus 2.3 – Creates Drop Down Menus for WordPress Admin Panels, just like Andy Staines’ original plugin, but without background pictures and special fonts.
• *PXS Mail Form 2.6 – Creates a mail form with multi part verification, various messages and an auto redirect on successful send.
• ***Related Posts 2.04 – Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches.
• ***Shylock Adsense 1.2 – Insert Adsense code in your pages without modifying the template.
• **Spam Karma 2 2.3 rc3 – Ultimate Spam Killer for WordPress.
• SRG Clean Archives 4.2 – This plugin is designed to display your archive listings in a clean, uniform, single-query fashion that’s Search Engine friendly on a dedicated page or in your sidebar.
• Submit It Plugin 1.0 – This plugin lists popular blog aggregator and feeds submitter.
• *Text Link Ads 3.0.6 – Really Simple Web/RSS Advertising For Personal or Commercial Use.
• *wp-cache 2.1.2 – Very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system.

I’ve had others, as well, but gradually had to whittle those away to get a base set. And these were my newest plugins.

• Link A Dink 1.8 – Replace strings with links (or other words I guess) to help replace targeted keywords with new text.
• obsocialbookmarker 4.0 – Add social book mark icons and links at the bottom of each post. I intended this to replace Submit It Plugin.
• OIOpublisher Direct 1.31 – Allow direct purchasing of paid posts and text links via WordPress, stop giving away commission to the middle-men! This plugin desperately needs updating now!

I will be turning on the most important ones as soon as I know if the base-3 are safe or not. That should be over the next 48 hours.

Then I will turn the plugins on every OTHER day, until I can determine where the problem lies. Of course, if I cannot still find the problem, then I’ll have to conclude that the problem lies within an interaction of different plugins.

Wish me luck.

The last few months since getting my own private hosting have been quite challenging in a number of ways as I have had to adapt my handling of my sites to a number of new contingencies: including weird spikes in server activity. It’s been quite a learning experience, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to go back to regular shared hosting! I love having my own server on Dreamhost…

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This graph is taken from December 5th and shows four significant spikes in server traffic in the previous 24 hours, with the spike around 00:00 being the largest and also bringing the server down!

Dreamhost helpdesk have VERY helpful to me over the years, and patiently answered almost every query fully and in detail. The last few times though have been frustrating because the amount of activity has been quite high on occasion (without obvious justification either!), and they were suggesting that perhaps I should raise the allocation of resources (and the cost!) to cover the spikes! Now, I’d already tried this once or twice: having raised my basis from $15.00 to $20.00 to $30.00. While this did indeed improve my server responsiveness, I was still getting server outages every day about once or twice a day, and it just didn’t seem that my server traffic justified that!

What is a poor server to do?

Go on a bug hunt! It’s that simple. I decided to find out what was going on, and see if I couldn’t eliminate all the other possibililties before increasing the expense further…!

Step 1. Find the Crap…

I was amazed how much crap had built up on my servers over the three years I’ve been using Dreamhost hosting… It was actually quite shocking. And it took me days to clear. But first I took stock of the files and data that were on my server: html files, jpegs, mp3s (not many), php, applications, data, backups, gzips, etc… Once I determined which domains and subdomains were only serving files, I could eliminate those pretty easily. Then I went on a hunt for old PHP applications, principally old versions of WordPress, Galleries, etc..

Step 2. Three Choices: Choose NOW!

On finding an application, I was faced with three choices: upgrade the software to the current version; remove the software entirely; or password the entire directory. In most cases, I chose the second option to cut down on the security risk. On one or two occasions, I passworded entire subdomains (with .htaccess and .htpasswd files) as well to provide access to these applications only to the person concerned. In the cases of my primary websites, upgrading became mandatory. In rare occasions, I moved applications to the root directory as a stop gap measure.

From now on, though, I’m going to be much stricter on removing old applications because of the potential security problems that can be hidden by forgotten software.

Step 3. Deleting unnecessary plugins and themes

Since most of my blogs run versions of WordPress 2.2+ and I usually auto-install or auto-update the files (courtesy of Dreamhost’s great service), the process is quite quick and painless. Dreamhost have gotten it down to a fine art, such that upgrading involves backing up the Database, Turning off the plugins (one click), click update, and wait for confirmation. But each and every time I update Dreamhost creates a backup of the original files named domain.old, and throws in EVERY theme they can get their hands on with each install). This leads to a lot of stuff each time. So I usually now delete 95% of the themes, and maintain a lean installation with as few plugins as possible (and none spare). This helps make WP as responsive as possible.

But as you can see I was still getting server spikes, and my options were running out. Everything was eliminated in one way or another, and the server was still coming down. So what next?

Step 4. Is it time to ‘log’ out?

I compared the performance of my main blog with several other blogs by checking the error.logs (I had never checked these before) just to see what was going on. Surprisingly, I found the logs quite detailed (they’re in your FTP folder called ‘logs’… click through to your domain to find the logs and then look for the error logs. They were dated a couple of days back so I had to check through and this is what I saw:

That’s right, line after line of the same error: this read “(12)Cannot allocate memory: couldn’t spawn child process: /dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi” and “(12)Cannot allocate memory: couldn’t create child process: …” To make sure that I wasn’t just reading regular errors, I queried it on Google and got nothing, then I checked the logs of WordPress Sites that I had just started with no themes or plugins. Sure enough, everything looked fine. Then I remember something a Dreamhost engineer had said:

Just the other day, I was dealing with a fellow who had a wordpress blog who was almost instantly crashing his PS with a single hit, because he had some wonky wordpress plugin which was spawning hundreds of php.cgi processes. Jeff

Well, thanks, Jeff. That has proved to be the best advice I’ve received yet… So I’ve been testing different plugins to find out which one or ones have been causing the problems. The best way to do this is to simply turn off all the plugins to restore the neutral state and then turn them on singly and checking the error log to eliminate those that don’t create the problem. I think I have a culprit already, but I’m now double checking them to make sure that I don’t blame the wrong plugin. Think ‘sticky’…

While the testing goes on, please excuse me for having unstable features on my blog as I try to eliminate the problem. But as you know, this problem has been going on for months; and this represents my best hope to get to the root of the problem.

Have you had these problems? What happened? I am not particularly an expert, but I was surprised at how much I could figure out by myself!